Presenting The Roller Coaster Wiki

In a World where roller coaster information was scattered throughout the Web, coaster enthusiasts had to do countless searches in order to do coaster research. Until, one day, a new website rose to the challenge with the help of an excellent group of resources. Now, there was hope. Now, there was the…

Roller Coaster Wiki – The Roller Coaster Information Aggregator
So what’s in the Roller Coaster Wiki? Only everything you want to know about a roller coaster that you were Googling several times for before. Now, you can find all this great information in one place. Roller Coaster Wikis are multimedia wikis that include:

-Golden Ticket Awards Ranks with a link to all of the winners
-Mitch Hawker’s Internet Coaster Poll Rank with a link to poll results
-Stats from the Roller Coaster Database with links to the full listing
-Images from Coaster Image or Theme Park Review, aerial views, & links to more images
-Current World records or special distinctions (as of 2/2010)
-Excerpts from Wikipedia with links to the full entry
-POV & Off-Ride Videos filmed by professionals or by the park (if available)
-Ratings from roller coaster fans sites with a link to full critical reviews

As with all wikis, visitors are invited to collaborate and improve it. You can leave reviews via comments and submit additions or edits. Visit The Roller Coaster Wiki.

The Best Roller Coasters in the World
The Roller Coaster Wiki now lists the ten best steel roller coasters in the United States and the three best steel roller coasters in the rest of the World. I used a mix of Mitch Hawker’s Internet Coaster Poll and the Golden Ticket Awards to create my own ranking of the best roller coasters. By merging the two polls, I was able to strike a balance between the Internet Coaster Poll’s heavy international focus and the Golden Ticket Awards’ U.S.-focused rankings. I will be adding wooden roller coasters in a few days.

Over time, I will be adding the most popular and highest ranked steel and wooden roller coasters. The wikis will allow for multimedia coaster tours where you can easily peruse all of the Bolliger & Mabillard Mega (Hyper) Coasters or Gravity Group coasters.

Thank You
Thanks to Gonch from Coaster Image, Robb from Theme Park Review, and Duane from the Roller Coaster Database. It’s always been my opinion that the Web is at its best when people collaborate and share resources. Although I know that there are some who are less willing do that, I appreciate your help on this project.

Also, I would like to thank my brother for his coding help, my wife for her great advice and allowing me to hog the laptop for hours on end, and my online friends that got a preview and gave me some feedback. I couldn’t have done this without you.

What’s Your Take?
What do you think of my new project, The Roller Coaster Wiki? I’m looking forward to your feedback. Leave a comment below.

Sorry for the double comment, but this just sprang up in my mind. Now we won't have fun playing our roller coaster games because everything is a click away. The whole point of the games were searching.

Don't worry CFC, you'll always have roller coasters to play coaster games with. At best I hope to have the top 100 or so most popular/best rated roller coasters. Not all of them. Unless, I get a huge staff or something

Looks great, Joel! I like how you did the landing page … very visually appealing and easy to navigate. You might want to check the Phantom's Revenge link. It was not working this morning. Roller Coaster Wiki is a great name, too … really tells just what the site is about. Congratulations on making your deadline!!!

I think it's a great idea to have a wiki by coaster enthusiasts, for coaster enthusiasts. I'll certainly plan on adding some content when I'm done getting my own site out of the door. Do you plan on adding the ability for users to add additional coasters, or control that yourself (maybe it's already there and I've missed it)? It would be good to see more UK coasters on there…

Nick, I'd love to do that, but unfortunately I don't know of any easy way to all others to add full entries. For now, everyone can add edits and additional information via the contact form. I'll have to noodle that some more Nick. Good idea!

I think it's worth thinking about for the future. If it's restricted to only you being able to add entries, that will limit the scope for the site growing. Having said that, I can understand the technical headaches of implementing it – and there's more than enough scope for growth in the short-term without worrying about it. Great job on the site so far.

I think I've come up with a fairly easy way to allow users create new coaster wiki pages. Bascially, they'll do some legwork and we'll do the rest. As long as we don't get a bunch of submissions it should be manageable. I'll let you know when this capability is up and running so that you can add great UK rides like Megafobia and Nemesis Inferno! Thanks for the suggestion.

I love it! Finally a great database other than RCDB! I'll do my best to try and help you out with the roller coasters here in Ohio, and some other major ones around the United States. Of course, this would all happen in my spare time, which right now is at 0! I love the idea, and the 13 that are up there right now are great. I look forward to seeing more coasters on there soon! Thanks CC!

Awesome. This seems like a great idea. Now people can navagate quickly and easily to find roller coasters. One problem, though. If this is going to have hundreds, maybe thousands of roller coasters on it, should't there be a search just for the wiki or something?

I don't forsee RCW getting any where close to as large as the roller coaster database. See my reply to CFC above. My goal is the top 100 or so best/popular coasters. Although Nick TPT has me thinking about ways to make it easier for users to create wiki pages on their own. If it blows up, it could get larger than I planned, but still not hundreds or thousands.

JaMeS, the Roller Coaster Wiki is a part of Theme Park Syndicate. It's one site with two, soon to be three major sections. I'll have another mini announcement (this time without the fanfare, countdown, and such) in the next week or so. I'll unveil the third and final part of Theme Park Syndicate.

I like where your heads at Quil! But, I already promised that this week's countdown would be 'final countdown' for a while. So maybe I'll just quietly launch the third section on 3/3/10. Depends on when it'll be ready. I've still got to wrap up the roller coaster wiki wooden coaster section hopefully tomorrow.

Thanks for the concern, but TPS won't be crowded or cluttered. Each of the three sections will be self-contained so there's no need to worry about the site getting to busy. Also, I work on websites for a living so, I think I can pull it off. Having said that, I invite everyone to let me know if there's anything you do or don't like about the site when it's all done.

I just gotta say, after looking over the Theme Park Syndicate as well as RCW, I thought it was HILARIOUS that you have a section titled "TPS Reports." Did you get the memo about the new covers on those TPS Reports? -Office Space, Classic Movie

Yeah, I couldn't help myself. It fit and I thought it was funny so I went with it. Sadly, it was too much work to crank out weekly reports, but maybe they'll return in a new form when the season's in full swing.

By the way, the wooden roller coasters have been added to the wiki! I'll be honest though, I haven't had a chance to proof it and check all of the links completely. But, you can see the top 10 U.S. and top 3 international wooden coasters in the Wiki!

T-Express is definitely on my most wanted list. It looks like El Toro on steroids. Okay, that sounds dated. It looks like El Toro on HGH. There, that's better. With El Toro being one of my favorite woodies, I'd bet T-Express would take that spot away.

Wow Joel, Holiday World is now getting the word out about RC Wiki on Facebook and Twitter. Definitely cool that your work is being talked about by theme parks now :D! LA Times Funland said something too.